None of them are. Instead, Apex's most recognizable weapon is its worst.
If you've played a couple of games of Apex Legends, you'll have heard the phrase "Mozambique over here". Players use the ping as an inside joke, the punchline is that you'd never want to actually pick it up.
"It has a cool, really distinct name. It's pretty sticky," says Slayback when he considers why the Mozambique found such notoriety in the Apex community. "There's sort of a Kobayashi Maru [a training exercise in Star Trek where new cadets are entered into a no-win situation] feel to it where you can play your cards right and you still lose. I think that it can be frustrating. You're never going to forget that"
If you’ve ever played a battle royale, you’ll know the highs and lows of that particular experience. And even though it’s a design choice that goes against the “even playing field” that used to be gospel for multiplayer shooters, Slayback says that arena shooters require a more even meta."All the weapons need to be balanced against one another. You're coming in with a loadout and the developer is expecting you to get unlocks in the game based on being able to be effective with every weapon."
Slayback, who worked on several Call of Duty and Titanfall games, explains the difference between Call of Duty meta and an Apex Legends meta. In Call of Duty, the balance challenge is to make all these vastly different weapons work together in an ecosystem. In reality, a small pistol is not going to be competitive with an assault rifle but in Nuketown, it has to be.""However, in Apex Legends, we designed it from the ground up with a sharp power curve." ‘Power curve’ is a condensed way of saying there are tiers of guns that are weaker and stronger than others on purpose. "The reason that we have a power curve in our game is so that the looting is even more fun. If you care more about getting a certain item and it has a certain kind of a rarity to it, it's going to feel really great when you achieve it. The weapon power needs to match that experience."
Randomness is key in the battle royale genre. Each match is a story because everyone has a different loadout that reflects their own path to the end game. That leaves an important question though: how do you design a bad gun well? While it might be substandard at beating your opponents, there's definitely a design quality to the Mozambique. It feels like it belongs in the world and it has its own personality.It turns out that the Mozambique started in the same place the vast majority of the weapons in Apex did, Titanfall 2."The first process was we had all Titanfall 2 weapons dropping in our Battle Royale prototype,” says Slayback. “It didn't work to have them all act the same way as they did in Titanfall for multiple reasons though."
In that game, Slayback explains, the Mozambique was too powerful. It killed pilots really quickly. But in Apex, characters have shields that allow them to take more damage. “All of a sudden, the Mozambique doesn’t feel strong.""We already had a couple of shotguns that were powerful for different reasons. We have the EVA-8 which is powerful because it's full-auto and it has a drum mag. I couldn't really make that have low capacity. Then we had the Peacekeeper. It's a new design with a unique choke so that you can hit precision shots at range. So, the Mozambique just naturally fell into its role of being lower than the other two."
One of the weakest aspects of the Mozambique is that it only has three rounds in its magazine. In Titanfall 2 it had six. Interestingly, such a drastic nerf was due to the design team's commitment to give the gun a meaningful personality. The name Mozambique, Slayback says, comes from a real-life shooting technique, the Mozambique Drill, which has a three bullet pattern."It feels like it wants to stay around multiples of three but it's too strong with six rounds in the mag. Making it four doesn't feel right. Three seems like the right number and personality.”
It feels crafted to be weak, in other words. Slayback says he always tells people that in Apex, "we don't have any bad weapons, we just have low power weapons."
In games that don't have great shooting mechanics, you might feel a disconnect between you and the action, whereas in a game with great shooting mechanics - such as Doom - weapons have a weight to them. Every time you use a BFG, you feel it kicking back against you. The Mozambique is similar, albeit on a smaller scale.
Animation helps to sell this weight. It's a magic trick that transforms the gun into something tangible. Slayback explains:"The collaboration between the design department and animation is very important. It's really critical the amount of ownership our animation department takes over this stuff."
There are so many things that we take for granted in the animations of the weapons. Traversing, switching between an offhand device and a weapon. “All those little transitions, everything is all handcrafted by Shawn [Wilson, lead animator]. So a huge shout out to what he does."
However, just because the Mozambique is weak now doesn't mean it always will be. When I asked Slayback if there is a world where the Mozambique could be buffed to be viable, he said:
"Yeah, we could. We could do it tomorrow if we wanted to but something mid-tier would have to come down. In terms of the ecosystem, if you have too many mid-tier choices than it's just another thing."
However, there is a significant change coming to the Mozambique with Season 2. A new hop-up called Hammerburst Rounds will fit the Mozambique, as well as the game’s other weakest weapon, the P2020. This will make both more effective against unshielded enemies. [Another hop-up is being added to the game called Disruptor Rounds for the Alternator and the RE-45 which will deal more damage to shields]. There are two key reasons for this. The first goes back to the frustration of ending up with a Mozambique alone."We wanted to bring up the low-end of the power curve. It felt like it was functioning correctly, but it felt like the variance was a little too high. When you're at the bottom, you're just not competitive. It's not exactly what we want the low end of the power curve to be."
On top of that, the team wanted to add a new flavor to the Apex smorgasbord.
"In some shooters that we admire, you care a lot more about your secondary weapon. You do part of the battle with one weapon and then you'll switch to another to finish a guy off or do a precision shot."
"Maybe you'll carry it into an endgame situation. I know that this will shred a guy in two shots and I can hit my pattern with it, so let's bring it."
All that being said, the Mozambique has likely cemented its place in the zeitgeist. Even with buffs and adjustments, it will probably be hard to shake its own reputation. That's great though. In the real world, the weapon's notoriety helped rally the game's community to raise money in aid of the recent Mozambique cyclone disaster.
However, even in games, it has an important banner to fly. It's a bad weapon, yes, but it's a monument to the idea that everything in a game is designed. No matter how throw-away, weak, quick or irrelevant something is to the critical path, a real human being did work for it to be there. The Mozambique wasn't just thrown into Apex Legends and abandoned in a weak form. It is the product of a team who caringly placed it at the bottom of the meta. Its an experience handcrafted lovingly so that you'd feel the universal joy of tossing it aside for literally anything else.
Patrick Dane is an 8-year entertainment journalist, follow him on Twitter at @PatrickDane.